SMART: Design and Evaluation of a Collaborative Museum Visiting Application

Many systems and applications have been developed to help visitors get around the museum and interact with the items on exhibition. However, most of the existing systems are developed to serve as a virtual tour guide and/or provide additional digital information using Augmented Reality techniques. Little attention has been paid to enabling visitors to interact with each other and share their experience with outsiders. In this paper, we describe the design and evaluation of a prototype of a museum touring application called SMART. This system was designed to explore how mobile devices can be used to connect museum visitors and their friends. It is intended to be a smart and novel mobile application that enables groups of museum visitors to select tours by their preferences, display relevant information about their tour and objects, provide interactive activities for tourists and let them mark their favourite exhibits. It also aims to streamline traditional museum tours by providing more interesting, more meaningful and more interactive parts to the tour.